Nature’s Deadliest Animal Wrangler

It’s not your average Top 10 list. In fact there are a lot more killer creatures on adventurer Steve Backshall’s World’s 60 Deadliest Animals list. And he is traveling the world in search of the creative ways critters kill each other.

The Nat Geo Wild channel airs the show, which follows Backshall around the world. He gets nipped by stellar sea lions before a pod of killer whales comes to interrupt the party. He gets punched by a mountain gorilla and pokes an alligator. Obviously, he doesn’t recommend trying anything he does at home.

But some of the cousins to the creatures he examines can be found right in our own backyards including, skunks and killer bees.

As he says, “If you are a small animal then yeah everything else wants to eat you.” He decided to go head to head with the top predators to show the purity and majesty of nature. But it’s likely the many close encounters he has had with some of the deadliest that inspired the show in the first place.

Steve Backshall with Jessica the Hippo in South Africa

Steve took a video camera and moved to the jungle of Colombia where he wrangled snakes and ultimately became National Geographic’s Adventurer in Residence after selling his video to them. From there he began traveling the world on expeditions which led to a couple of other wild animal shows, including a stint at the BBC.

Some of his career highlights — sharing a beach with 75,000 nesting olive ridley turtles, having a baby mountain gorilla take him by the hand, and having a red-eyed tree frog leap into his face on camera. He has scaled jungle mountains only to explore giant sinkholes and he has discovered never-before-seen creatures high atop a craggy Venezuelan mountain. The list goes on an on and on.

According to the his Deadliest 60 bio, “He’s been squirted with ink by Humboldt squid, flirted with by tarantula, assaulted by giant arapaima fish, stared out by thresher and great hammerhead sharks, mugged by pink river dolphins, and charged by elephants, but still maintains that wild animals pose no threat to people.”

But he started out as an English and Theatre (he’s British) major who moved to Japan to become a black belt in Karate, teach English and work as a model. Soon after he began writing for the Rough Guides travel book series before finding his niche as a television adventurer.

For those not looking for more than arm-chair danger this weekend, there is a World’s 60 Deadliest marathon on Labor Day on Nat Geo Wild.